Re: Openfiler - anyone used it?

["Martyn Wendon" <martynwendon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Paul,

Apologies for the delay in replying!

SAS drives - keep an eye on eBay - I've been picking up new sealed 300GB
15,000 rpm drives occasionally for no more than £90 or so..... put a
pair of
them in RAID 0 on a Dell Perc 5i SAS controller (eBay, no more than
£40)
.... and performance will improve untold!

For network bonding on the ESXi host, if I remember I did have to do
something on the switch, but it's been so long now that I can't recall
exactly what!  I think that I just did a search on google for ESXi and
Netgear trunking / lag and followed an article I found....

I'm migrating my last physical Windows server this weekend (SBS 2003) to a
VM (SBS 2008), which will no doubt prove interesting - it's been on the
to-do list for over a year now :-(


Martyn


----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Gale" <groups2@xxxxxxx>
To: <ukha_d@xxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, October 04, 2010 10:23 PM
Subject: RE: [ukha_d] Openfiler - anyone used it?


Hi Martyn,

I've now setup an openfiler box and have two ESXi servers talking to it
over
iSCSI - works pretty well. Performance was pants to start with but that was
mostly due to my exchange server and a load of other stuff originally
running on one box with only 8GB ram - having two boxes running seems to
have sorted that but it's early days.

I took your advice and got a nice GS724 and a couple of cheap PCI-X nics -
the iSCSI is running on it's own over the new switch and maxing out the
single (so far) 1Gb connection with larger transfers. I even got my 3Ware
9590se card working but it only has slower SATA drives, so I think that's a
bit of a bottleneck - if only I could afford a load of fast SAS drives!

The one question I have for you - I've read a lot on bonding but still not
sure about how best to implement it - how did you setup yours? Not so much
the OF side, as that (appears) to be OK, although there are many blogs and
posts talking about modifying config files! I'm more thinking about the
ESXi
side (ESXi 4.1) and whether you had to do any config on your switch?

Many thanks,


Paul.

-----Original Message-----
From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_d@xxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Martyn Wendon
Sent: 24 September 2010 18:26
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ukha_d] Openfiler - anyone used it?

Hi Paul,

I'm using Netgear GS series smart switches, performance seems OK to me, but
I guess it depends on your specific requirements.  Big switches (costing in
the thousands) tend to have a CPU per port, lower end switches have a CPU
per group of ports - I made sure that I put the VLANs on different port
groups to spread the load.

The VMs using ISCSI run well - they are mainly desktop PCs though (XP) that
I use for specific tasks (e.g. VS2008 development work, Flash development
work), they are on 24/7 but don't get used 24/7 if that makes
sense....Previously I had these VMs running on a 1TB SATA 7200RPM drive
locally in the ESXi box and the performance over ISCSI is infinitely more
snappy - but the RAID0 SAS 15,000 RPM drives and dedicated controller in
the
OF box are responsible for that more than anything :-)

eBay is your friend for great bargains on ex-corporate IT gear that tends
to
be well looked after and run in air conditioned comms rooms.  I picked up
GS716, GS724 and GS748 Netgear switches over the past few years for
£80, £90
and £150 respectively - that's a pretty healthy saving over the cost
of new
ones!  Intel quad port GB Nics come up from time to time (PCI-e), depends
on
how much of a rush you are in!  I've accumulated 5 of those over a period
of
time and have never paid more than £100 or so for each.......again, a
significant saving over the cost of new ones.

I also found that Intel dual port GB Nics can be had pretty cheaply if you
have a machine that can take advantage of PCI-x cards (I use HP ML115
boxes).  I bagged 4 PCI-x cards a while back for £40!


One word of warning if you're going to use ISCSI for VMs - things can go
awfully awry with a Windows install if the ISCSI drive suddenly disappears,
so give consideration to making the OF box as redundant as possible and
don't forget the networking infrastructure in-between the ESXi box and OF
box too!


Hope this helps,

Martyn

----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Gale" <groups2@xxxxxxx>
To: <ukha_d@xxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2010 1:11 PM
Subject: RE: [ukha_d] Openfiler - anyone used it?


> Ah really interesting - I'm sure I'll have a couple of questions when
I
> think it through a bit more. But a few to start:
>
> I have a managed gigabit switch that can create VLANs etc - never them
> though - can a switch like this share iSCSI traffic and heavy network
> traffic with no performance loss, or do you really need to dedicate a
> whole switch to it for performance?
>
> A VM that boots and runs from the OpenFiler store - is this as good
> performance wise as running from a local single disk (or better -
> obviously depending on what type of h/w the openfiler box is based
on)???
>
> Did you buy your quad port nic's new or ebay etc? - what model?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Paul.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_d@xxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
> Martyn Wendon
> Sent: 22 September 2010 20:16
> To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [ukha_d] Openfiler - anyone used it?
>
> Yep, OpenFiler rocks :-)
>
> I have 2 * 2TB WD SATA drives exposed over SMB & NFS and 2 * 300GB
SAS
> 15,000 in Raid 0 on a Dell Perc 5i SAS Raid card exposed over ISCSI.
>
> Box is an HP ML115 AMD Opteron Quad Core with 8GB Ram and a quad port
> Intel Pro GB PCI-e NIC card, 2 ports bonded for ISCSI traffic and 2
ports
> bonded for normal traffic (plus on-board NIC for management traffic).
>
> ESXi boxes using ISCSI for (some) VMs, dual quad port Intel Pro GB
PCI-e
> NIC cards in those too to allow segmentation of ISCSI traffic (as well
as
> bonding for VM traffic).
>
> Needless to say GB switches (Netgear) with appropriate LAGs and VLANs
to
> separate the network traffic....
>
> All works rather well IME.
>
>
> Martyn
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Paul Gale" <groups2@xxxxxxx>
> To: <ukha_d@xxxxxxx>
> Sent: Monday, September 20, 2010 3:33 PM
> Subject: [ukha_d] Openfiler - anyone used it?
>
>
>> I'm just thinking about re-arranging my home, HA and work storage.
>>
>> One of my thoughts was to implement an openfiler NAS, connected to
VMWare
>> ESXi VM servers (that I'm already running), rather than the
physical
>> Windows 2008 R2 file server and raid 5 setup I have.
>>
>> Has anyone here setup an openfiler box?
>>
>> Paul.
>>
>>
>>
>> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------
>>
>>
>> Yahoo! Groups Links
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>



------------------------------------